GE enters deal to make NYPA 'first fully digital utility'

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Dive Brief:

General Electric and the New York Power Authority on Wednesday announced an agreement to create what they called “the world’s first fully digital utility."

The agreement calls for GE to explore the digitalization of NYPA’s 16 generating facilities, 1,400 miles of transmission lines and the more than 1,000 public buildings it monitors in the state.

NYPA plans to use the digitized resources to optimize its entire electrical network for reliability, affordability, and the lowest possible carbon footprint.

Dive Insight:

The new agreement between NYPA and GE builds on a 2016 deal in which NYPA committed to using GE’s asset performance management software to monitor, analyze and enhance the performance of its generating assets. That initiative was part of NYPA’s five-year plan to make its generation and transmission assets smarter, more resilient and better able to detect potential outages.

As part of the new agreement, GE’s Predix application development platform will become the basis for NYPA’s expansion of its industrial internet of things (IoT) network that NYPA says will enable it to build a dashboard to see the health of all its power plants and transmission assets.

NYPA also intends to explore intelligent environment technology from Current, powered by GE, to improve energy efficiency and digital productivity in public buildings and throughout its municipal customer base. The expansion of that program will include several smart city demonstration projects across the state.

“NYPA is committed to the further build-out of our vision to become the first digital utility, creating a real-time digital replica of our assets and automating many back-office processes,” Gil Quiniones, president and CEO of NYPA, said in a statement.

On a smaller scale, GE and Exelon paired up in a deal to improve reliability for six of Exelon's utilities using GE's software. Both deals highlight how utilities are increasingly turning to digital platforms to collect data for better system management.